Can you all see where the author is going with this?: A Conversation

According to Manuel António Pina, “writing is a series of inquiries”: “A question on a head. – Like a crown of thorns.” Poetry, theatre, children’s books and newspaper columns were all forms in which he precisely (adverbs of manner were dear to him) explored a number of fundamental questions and concerns. Always within the same precise relationship with the word as a means to invoke existence and the world, giving names to their mystery. “Go then, poem, and seek the literal voice/ that unconstrainedly speaks/ under all that literature.” The poet seeks that pure, initial voice, the voice of childhood, “untarnished by words and memory”. However (a word he always liked), we are words and memory. “We live, and we write, with memory and against it.” This conversation “about literature, that is, about everything” brings together the poet Rui Lage, the essayists Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre and Rosa Maria Martelo, the stage director João Luiz, former artistic director of Pé de Vento, a theatre company of which Pina was both one of the founders and “resident playwright”, and actress Patrícia Queirós, who belonged to the company and is now a member of our resident cast. Thus, we return to his “uninhabited house of words”. How does such a conversation proceed? “With a certain degree of abstraction and no precise planning.”